Helping students succeed in AP CS: GT Computing Undergraduate Female Rising Up to Challenge in CS

There’s a common refrain heard at “CS for All” and BPC events in the US these days. “AP CS A is just terrible. AP CS Principles will fix everything.” The reality is that there are bad AP CS A classes, and there are good ones. There is evidence that just having good curricula doesn’t get you more and more diverse students. The more important reality is that AP CS A accurately matches most introductory computer science classes in the United States. If you want students to succeed at the CS classes that are in our Universities today, AP CS A is the game to play at high school.

That’s why Barbara’s Rise Up programs are so important. She’s helping female and African-American students succeed in the CS that’s in their schools and on University campuses today. And she’s having tremendous success, as seen in the story below about a female high school football player who is now a CS undergraduate.

Barbara’s work is smart, because she’s working with the existing CS infrastructure and curricula. She’s helping students to succeed at this game, through a process of tutoring and near-peer mentoring. This is a strategy to get more female CS undergraduates.

That’s when she discovered Sisters Rise Up 4 CS, a relatively new program developed in Fall 2014 at Georgia Tech by Barbara Ericson. The program was based on Project Rise Up 4 CS, which aims to help African-American students pass the AP Computer Science A exam. Sisters Rise Up does the same for females.The program offers extra help sessions in the form of webinars and in-person help sessions, near-peer role models, exposure to a college campus, and a community of learners.“The program helped me get hooked on computer science,” Seibel said. “I started to actually learn. Seeing that some of the girls in the program had interned at Google or other places like that, and that they really loved CS, it gets you excited about it. They were only a few years older than me, and I was like, ‘Oh. That could be me.’”

Source: GT Computing Undergraduate Sabrina Seibel Rising Up to Challenge in CS | College of Computing